DAY 1 - BITCOIN Nashville 2024

First day of conferences can be like that first day at School. You never know who your going to meet and the prospect of walking into that big unknown world can be both exciting and frightening at once.

BITCOIN Nashville was anything but. Everyone wanted to be here! Attendees had a child like glow you see when kids experience something fun and new.

For me, the fun began at the Nakamoto stage with a session titled 'Nation State Game Theory: Energy Infrastructure'. Harry Sudock (GRID Infrastructure), Jeff Lucas (BitFarms), Lisa Hough (Bitcoin today Coalition) and moderator Troy Cross from the Bitcoin Policy institute. Their discussion covered some new themes I'd encourage others to dive deeper on....

0930

Bitcoin requires lots of power to perform the mathematical puzzles to mine it so it must be a drain on the power companies, right? Power Companies have a strange business model where they pay others to take their excess power capacity. The analogy was made to Apple paying people to take their excess iPhones which of course makes little sense.

Bitcoin steals power supply and puts onerous expense on last mile consumers especially during a crisis. Convential wisdom and media suggests this but consider Berkshire Hathaway. They offered Texas 10 Peaker Power plants to help during peak cycles as the name suggests. In exchange for their CapEx investment they would be guaranteed 10% profits across the top. That would equate a guaranteed tax across the top for every power consumer from the stay at home mom to the small business owner. It would come as a small line item at the bottom of their power bill each month that would add an additional $2-$10. Texas said no thanks. Converse to that, RIOT bitcoin mining built their own power generation on their own dime and actually shut down bitcoin mining during the 2024 Hurricane to reroute power to those who were affected.

Traditional Finance 'will not solve the custody issue' that makes compliance and ease of use difficult until the companies these speakers on stage represent are as big as they are.

Bitcoin Is transparency and too transparent- contrary to popular belief every transaction on the chain can be traced making anonymity difficult.

11AM 
God Bless Bitcoin was premiered on the second floor of the civic center. A smaller sized room with about 150 seats and tables in the back were arranged towards a large screen where the show was played.

Admittedly - I had no preconceived notions about the film other than what Natalie B from Coinstories podcast had mentioned when interviewing the husband and wife directors about the film. 

WOW doesn't begin to describe how informational this film is. Its an embodiment of all the things I've learned about Bitcoin over the years in a concise and well explained production. 

Watch it here or navigate to our homepage and watch this compelling video 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oksraL7wN6Q

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1pm

Blackrock is the largest asset manager in the world and its head of Crypto investments Robert Mitchnik who is credited with 'Orange Pill'ing its CEO Larry Fink took the stage. For me, Blackrock has been a bit of a black box, no pun intended so curiosity compelled my attention to his session. The following are some of the themes he shared....

Aladdin is Blackrocks secret sauce. Its a software program that provides market analysis for each investment organization operating under the blackrock umbrella. 

In 2021 Blackrock began working with Coinbase who is one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world.

In 2022, Blackrock created a private trust where they would hold Bitcoin for their IBIT ETF fund that was in the works and ultimately approved by the SEC in early 2024 along with 9 other firms such as Grayscale.

Blackrock looks for assets that operate with near zero correlation. I took that to mean they want assets that stand on their own such as Gold and Silver. In so many words I interpreted Robert to suggest that Blackrock sees Bitcoin standing on its own.

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2pm

Some may recall seeing Rocky at the movie theater. You couldn't help but walk out of there with that feeling to whip someone's ass. The Make Bitcoin in America Great Again contoured up those feelings with a strong entrance by Jimmy Song and fellow stage dwellers Ben Asken (MMA Fighter) and Luke Rudkowski (We are Change). Jimmy started off his introduction diss'ing the Blackrock speaker a few before him by calling them "Rent Seekers" who prey off others as a middle man. He carried the crowd further with drawing comparisons to what many of us know as the administrative state as being rent seeking.